Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Warfare today has little to do with numbers. Modern weapons allow even small numbers of advanced weapon systems to inflict devastating damage. The key lesson of the Falkland's war was that warships are almost completely defenceless in the face of modern air attack and have no defence whatsoever from nuclear powered attack submarines.
In that case:
1) Why conscription? And please note recordari's very salient point about who gets conscripted in the end. If it's about hardware, not numbers, why bother?
2) The small agricultural country is going to get and successfully deploy better military hardware - especially robotics - than the very much larger, very much richer, industrially-oriented country with lots of robotics factories. Absolutely. The same way Britain in WWII was totally independent of US weapons factories.
People are not taking your message well, Tom, because your message is essentially YELLOW PERIL BE AFRAID, backed up by some dreamland jingoism and the fact that China has started giving aid to neighbouring nations. It's not precisely convincing.
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I believe Lucy has a pony next to her fusion reactor.
I aim to please.
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I inadvertantly inhaled a teensy bit of chlorine gas while attempting to make said substance. Ooops.
Incidentally, never clean up urine with bleach, unless you want to follow James' brave example.
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I am picking that as a new record speed for even Publicaddress to introduce identity politics into a foreign policy debate.
Oh, like casually slagging off immigrants from China as disloyal? Yep, pretty speedy.
With an efficient Air Force equipped with adequate modern weapons we could hold off anyone short of the United States Navy.
And if I had a working fusion plant and a pony I could supply clean electricity to the entire country, too.
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(China now the third largest aid provider in the region? How bloody dare they!)
I know! I mean, it's not like upstanding, noble countries like Australia or Japan would ever offer aid in the implicit expectation of minor favours like space to dump boat people or support for whaling. That would be wrong.
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Of course, we may need some kind of island-based solution to the problem of the potentially "disloyal" NZ Chinese population. Survivor Soames, anyone?
But they're disloyal foreigners - in that situation, can we really trust them not to eat the tuatara?
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know it takes a long time for anything new to penetrate all the way to Dunedin, but how about you update your thinking for the 21st century rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la"?
You mean the twenty-first century where it's okay for a country with a sixth of the Earth's population and its fastest-growing economy to take an interest in the region around it?
There's a debate to be had about how China conducts its foreign policy, but demanding that it not interact with its neighbours because it frightens the white people isn't it.
Awesome. Does this mean we reinstate compulsory military service?
If we round up all the unemployed people and put them in the army, we're only looking at, what, hundred-to-one odds? Plus, the unemployment rate drops to zero! Clearly a winning solution.
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Teaching it would be an entirely different matter. "Yes the colours are pretty, but could you just please concentrate on the $500 auto-pipette, because you just stuck it in sulfuric acid." That sort of thing?
More like "turning the pipetter upside-down when you have fluid in the tip does not make it work better. No, really. Really."
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unlike Lucy, I find Colorimetric assays quite sexy
Spend three hours trying to get first-year university students to do them correctly and that embarrassing problem will go away very quickly, I promise.
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Lucy, that's what you do? Awesome :-)
Not precisely, but with the exception of some minor details ("I can say that this strain is probably not enterotoxic. Unless I set the conditions wrong. Or forgot to add the DNA. Or it's mutated from the sequence on Genbank.") it certainly looks very much like what I'm doing right now, especially when I run out of stuff to do and resort to staring at the PCR machine in the hope that it will magically go faster.